We’ve been super busy down at The Shop. Here’s one of the classic restoration projects we completed this past summer but haven’t had a chance to share our photos of it until now. Hope you enjoy this sweet 1969 Chevy C20!
We finished this 1980 Corvette Stingray about a month ago and wanted to share some photos of the project. Although restoration projects are a lot of work, they are also a lot of fun. And they look totally sweet when they are done. We always work with our clients to help bring their thoughts and vision of their dream car to reality. This particular client started with a blue car with a silver interior. Now he has the car he has always wanted.
If you have any questions about how we can help you get the car of your dreams, give us a call.
Photos of the 1980 Corvette Stingray
- This is what we started with. Looks pretty empty.
- Looking at the floor pan. No rust — that’s a plus!
- Insulation being installed in the back of the interior.
- Trying to figure out how to rerun the cabling to the CB antennae — underneath the carpet — was tricky.
- More insulation going in.
- Looks kind of intimidating, huh?
- The passenger-side door.
- A new electrical board was needed for the dash gauges. John soldered all of the connections back together that were broken.
- This steering column was the biggest nightmare of the project.
- So many parts! This steering column is super complicated. We had to go in pretty far to find the broken parts and replace them in order to fix it.
- The interior the owner ordered was grey. He wanted it black. We used a special auto-grade spray paint.
- Just finished painting the windshield trim piece.
- This the color of the plastic of much of the interior parts before they were painted.
- Insulation on the driver’s side.
- Sound proofing under the driver’s seat.
- Insulation over passenger wheel well.
- Checking the electrical on the passenger-side door.
- Sound proofing in front of the battery box.
- Insulation finished in the back. Looks good, ready for carpet.
- Sound proofing going in behind the dash.
- Starting to organize the wiring system.
- This little bolt was rusted through and it took us awhile to get it out of there!
- Checking out the driver-side door. We found some electrical problems with the lock switch.
- We tried to solder this connection, but it was too far gone. We had to find a different switch from the junk yard. We soldered the new one in. Now it works like a dream come true.
- New leather dash from Corvette America.
- Recovered speaker covers.
- New steering wheel.
- Gauge cluster reinstalled. Everything is now in working order.
- This is another piece we had to fabricate. In a normal Corvette, along the center console is just carpet. We fabricated a piece to give it strength and stability so it wouldn’t just flap around.
- These little pieces of carpet took us most of a day to figure out where they went.
- All coming together nicely.
- We also repainted these visors to match.
- New black seat belts were installed. The trim in the roof we also repainted.
- There were huge gaps around the sound bar. We had to custom fit the carpet around it. Now it looks like it was always meant to be there.
- Sound bar. This thing sounds sweet.
- New batter in the battery box.
- New lids over the battery box and tool compartment.
- Showing off our handiwork.
- Finished driver’s side.
- View of the back.
- Don’t the new door panel and seats look good?
- Customer was super surprised when he turned the key on and saw lights that had never worked before.
- One happy customer.
This beautiful truck is a 1949 Studebaker 2R-5. Although 110,500 were made between 1949 and 1953 you just don’t see them very often especially in this great condition. This truck rewrote the book in almost every way. Leaving the factory it weighed a meager 2,840 lbs., 400 less than its rivals. That helped this truck get great gas milage even in today’s standards. This truck will do better than 22 mpg around town and even better with an optional overdrive exclusive to Studebaker in the truck world. But that did not make this truck a weakling; with a payload of 1,760 it trumped chevy by 640 lbs. This truck is powered by a 169.6 cu.in. flat head straight 6 pumping out 80 hp. Later models would be equipped with 102 hp. Here at The Shop we love these old trucks. They are simple to work on and beautiful to look at — they just don’t make them like they used to. If you have any questions about this project or how we can help with your classic truck restoration give us a call.
The shop welcomes a C3 (1968-1982) 1980 corvette. There were 40,614 corvettes made in 1980 and there are still a lot of them around. this car is the second C3 that we have worked on in the past few months. This project is a little more intense than the last.
- 1980 Corvette has arrived at The Shop
- The guy who owns this car flies F-15s so we named his car Agent-Orange. That paint looks good and we love the color!
- The list of things to do reaches the floor. This will be a lot of work but the end result will be worth it. This is going to be a great car.
We at The Shop are of a firm belief that there is a time and place for everything — a time to cherry-out restore and a time to leave it be; a time to upgrade and improve, and a time to restore the stock parts for another 50 years of life.
Every now and then we find a restoration we love and get ideas we can incorporate into our current projects. And then there are those cars we find and drool after and which totally change our lives…
This “Derelict” restomod by automotive expert Jonathan Ward of Los Angeles is one such project that we recently discovered and totally falls in line with what we (Chris and Lindsie) are looking at doing with our 1955 Buick. This clip is from Jay Leno’s Garage last summer. Ward married a 1952 DeSoto to a Chrysler Town & Country. Take a look:
Don’t you just love that patina? It’s just like our Buick. We’ve been thinking for a long time about just leaving it be — exterior, chrome, bumper, everything but upgrade everything you can’t see.

A shot from our 2010 Christmas card photo shoot featuring our 1955 Buick Roadmaster. Photo by Shawn Raecke.
I’m not sure how quickly this concept will be adopted by the car restoration industry. The rat-rod experts out there are doing their part to help, but it’ll take a few years to gain steam. We found this evident in the last couple car shows we entered our Buick in. Yes – we entered her even though we had done almost no work to her at all. That wasn’t the point — we feel that classics are a piece of history and need to be seen, not parked.

The Buick at it’s second ever car show — in disguise as Puff the Magic Dragon. Photo by Lindsie Bergevin.
The Buick gained acceptance at the annual Halloween Trunk or Treat at a local Boise drive in. The dry ice clouds pouring from the snout did a number on the small kids, but all the same, it was a load of fun. The condition of her exterior fit right in. We got lots of comments and laughs.
But a real-live car show? That was another story.

A young high school couple were the perfect models for a quick photo in the ’55 Buick. Photo by Chris Bergevin.
The 2012 Northwest Motorfest was the real deal — a juried show and we were one of few of the ’50s era Buicks that attended. None had the patina like ours, though. We got a lot of comments: some encouraging, some discouraging. Everything from “Oh, my mom had one of these and I remember riding in it as a kid….” to “you’ve got a lot of work head of you.” Some people couldn’t believe why we entered. Others were glad to see something not perfect. All in all, though, it was good to spread the message of the value of imperfect, classic, daily drivers.
Maybe one day it will be totally cherried out — most likely it’ll be rebuilt on the inside but will be a total surprise to everyone else. Either way, it’s going to get its time in the sun. That patina still has more aging to do!
The Shop is getting ready to start on our first project — a 1956 Ford Fairlane. It’s a 2-door hardtop coupe and will need work inside and out. It currently does not run, and the fun is bout to begin as Chris and John start to dig in to the engine bay. Once it is up and running, the exterior and interior will be up next.
Stay tuned for updates!

